Beijing Bastard (12 page)

“We went to a wedding this weekend,” my mom reported breathlessly. “My friend Janet, my oldest friend from Burma who lives in Philadelphia, remember her? Her oldest daughter, Lisa, the one named after me, got married. She's five two and her husband is six one. Can you imagine? Guess where they met? Emergency room. Emergency room doctors. All their friends at the wedding were doctors too. Boy, those doctors sure know how to party! All out on the dance floor until the wedding was over. I said, ‘How do you do it?' And Lisa said, ‘We work hard but we play hard too!'”

It wasn't enough that we had to excel at work, but we had to excel at getting married and partying too. Did it ever end? My best friend from childhood had gone to medical school but she had shocked everyone by marrying an East Village tattoo artist.

“Do you like him?” I asked my mom after the wedding.

“It's her life to ruin,” she answered.

I wondered what my parents told their friends about me, or if they even spoke about me at all.

Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. “My friend Betty is organizing a tour group that is coming to China during the anniversary celebration in October,” my mom said. “One week, eight cities. It comes to Beijing first.”

“Are you joining it?”

“We're thinking about it,” my mom said.

“No, no,” my dad said. “No decision yet.”

“Is it a tour for white people?” I asked. “That might be kind of weird for you guys.”

“No, everyone on it is Chinese. All the tour guides will speak Chinese.”

“I think you should do it. Bobo and Bomu and I can take you around Beijing.”

“No decision yet,” my dad repeated.

“Your sister can come for a week to take care of Nainai,” my mom said to him. “You take care of her the rest of the year; Judy can do it for one week.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “We have to go.”

My parents in China: It was hard to imagine. As much as I associated them with this place, it was me who actually lived here.

For hours after I talked to them, I sat paralyzed on my couch, unable to reenter the fragile life I'd built for myself
here.

C
ity Edition
moved to the Asia-Pacific Building, a ten-story yellow-brick building with red trim and a huge Bank of China billboard clapped to the roof. It was a step up from the Office of Defense Conversion, and to Max's delight, the building had been designed using feng shui principles dictating that none of the doors or windows could face a cardinal direction and so the whole building sat at an awkward angle to the road. (I laughed, but about a year after we moved into the building, Sue and Max sold the magazine for a sizeable amount of money.) The building was actually an apartment building and the new office was a three-bedroom. One bedroom held the editorial department, one the design department, and the third was Max's office complete with a “computer” that was merely a monitor and keyboard sitting in jaunty relationship to each other. The large living room was for advertising. In the kitchen, our driver regularly whipped up multicourse lunches for us. Max took an apartment upstairs and would drift lazily down to the office in a shorty robe emblazoned with the artist Xu Bing's fake Chinese characters. It was a homey arrangement.

But sitting with my desk facing Sue's all day was nerve-racking. She looked on impatiently as I labored over my articles, self-consciously doing interviews over the phone and polishing each sentence to a lapidary perfection. When I finally submitted them to her, she would crack them into pieces and rewrite them in her own voice, pooh-poohing my objections. “Why are you mad about my edit?” she said once. “That story was no good in the first place.”

Most weekend nights found me drinking with Jade, Steve, and Max in a bar filled with other expats. I drank to forget the difficulties of my life: being lonely, struggling at my job, chasing a dream that seemed so out of reach. As winter deepened, so did the drinking. But no matter how much I drank, I never really felt better.

While I enjoyed spending time with Jade, there were so many ways in which we were mismatched. One Saturday afternoon we watched
Beijing Bastards
together in Steve's apartment; Jade had found a pirated VCD of it. “Val,
this
is the movie that brought you to China?” she said. “It stinks
.
”
And seeing it through her eyes, I realized it did stink. Plotless, inane, badly shot. Drained of all the secret meaning it had had for me. I saw the foundation of my dreams from a different angle, one that made it look flimsy and vaguely risible. I wished I hadn't rewatched it, especially with Jade.

So when a woman with a British accent called me at
City Edition
to tell me about an art exhibition of hers that she hoped I would promote in the arts listings, I jotted a note to myself to go. It seemed a promising place to meet some new friends. The woman introduced herself as Cookie Cousins and said she'd studied calligraphy at the Central Academy of Fine Arts the previous year and her work was all modern calligraphy, and that I should come along to the opening in a few weeks. There was something inviting in her voice, aside from the fact that she was inviting me to invite the whole city to her opening.

When the night came, Jade had no interest in going. I donned a new pair of boots, which were tall and black with three-inch high heels and
two big silver buckles. In the store they had looked sexy and dangerous, but when I strapped them on, they looked gaudy and ridiculous. The more I looked, the less I could tell. I teetered down Sanlitun, buoyed by the rowdy laughter and yelling jangling out of the bars into the dark street.

The Dreamy Gallery was small, full of people and blindingly bright inside. I walked in mincing steps around the perimeter, looking at the art and trying not to topple over. The calligraphy barely looked like characters, more like abstract ink-drip paintings, wild and idiosyncratic. Tall paper lanterns painted in the same way glowed warmly on the floor. I looked around for Cookie. She was easy to spot, in an unabashedly loud thrift-store dress, messy spiky hair, and big clear-framed glasses, talking nonstop in a high-pitched, dotty British accent, surrounded by friends, some Western, some Chinese.
You should be my friend,
I thought as I stood blankly on the other side of room with the light glaring on my awful boots,
but I left my thrift-store clothes at home.
I went home without even saying hi.

The next Saturday night when my phone rang, it was Jade as usual. I dutifully headed out to meet her, Steve, and Max. While other parts of the city went quiet at night, my street was filled with a strange mix of people: dour and tired farmers who had come to the neighborhood to work on all-night construction projects, hairdressers who also worked all night, karaoke girls in tight floor-length outfits, men in suits driving black cars, young Westerners headed out to bars. I didn't blend in, but I didn't stick out either. My neighborhood was itself a nightlife destination, lined with pleasure palaces with English monikers: the Backingham Palace, a cylindrical bathhouse with gigantic copper columns; the Moon and Stars karaoke bar; and Maggie's 2, a brothel advertising itself with a huge photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking a cigar. At the only intersection in the neighborhood sat the New Ark Hotel, a three-star affair that rented out what they called “o'clock rooms” that went for a much cheaper rate than a whole night. Being out on the street was like teetering on the
edge of the world, but it felt safer than being in my apartment. At least I wasn't breaking any laws out there.

That night was like any other, save for the fact that one minute we were at the bar and the next Max was in my bed complaining about how uncomfortable it was. Max was not my type. Macho. Commanding. A bulldog. But this was Beijing, where the rules seemed to be the opposite of what they were at home.

His warm body was comforting. But his smoky breath was repulsive, as was the thought of the dark, rotting infinity where once his teeth had been. He wore bright red briefs, which I did not allow him to take off. He pulled me closer and I mimicked his desire. Our chests touching, the warmth of his back against my forearms, our legs beginning to entwine. I wanted it, then I didn't. It was warm, but it turned my stomach. Jade's voice popped into my head.
What
can he do for
me?
You had to know what you wanted. I did. I didn't. I didn't. My disgust coalesced finally into a hard kernel. I pushed him away and got up.

“I'm not really into this,” I said, and then drove what I thought would be the final nail in the coffin. “I think I'm a lesbian. Sorry.”

“If you're a lesbian, then we can snuggle and it will be no problem,” he said, as if we were playing a game of logic.

“Go to sleep.”

“I cuddle with my good friends all the time without any problem.”

“We're not good friends. Go to sleep.”

After that night, my relationship with Max slowly deteriorated until we barely talked to each other anymore. He no longer helped me with my articles and I stopped my clumsy attempts at pampering or doting. I was stunned and embarrassed. By getting involved with Zhang Yuan and Max, I had alienated the two men who were going to help me reach my filmmaking dreams and help me make it as a journalist. Everything I'd come here for seemed to be slipping out of my hands.

I told no one at the office but Jade and I told her the story mostly for
comic effect, about his clumsy kisses and the red briefs and about my lesbian confession.

“I guess I'll be buying my own drinks from now on.”

“Lesbian?” she said in a naughty tone of voice. “Really?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably not. All I know is I don't like Max. And I don't need him.”

And I realized it was true. If I wanted to be these men, why didn't I just be them, instead of idolizing them, depending on them, ending up in bed with them, and waking up in the morning even more empty-handed than when I went to
sleep?

O
ne Saturday morning, Bobo called me to tell me that Xiao Peng was driving the family to IKEA—Beijing's first—up on the North Fourth Ring Road and to ask if I wanted to meet them there. I said yes, welcoming the chance to spend time with them out of the house. I was so thankful not to be living together anymore and so glad they knew nothing about the messiness of my life. IKEA was the newest tourist destination for locals in Beijing—I even brought along my camera.

The store was packed. A sign in the bedroom department invited shoppers to try out the beds for at least a few moments, but there was no need for such an invitation. Entire families bounced up and down together on the beds. People sat on all the sofas and picked up and examined every utensil in the model kitchens, as if encountering the relics of a futuristic civilization. We joined in.

After a walk through the store, Bobo and Bomu sank down into two recliners. They looked slightly ill at ease and seeing them there reminded me of my very last visit to their big courtyard house, the one that had been demolished the summer before. I had returned to that house one
day to find a pert single bed sitting in a corner of the living room, which had been completely cleared of the sagging couches and worn side tables. The bed had been covered with a fresh pink bedspread, and the two cracked walls of the corner it sat in had been plastered with flowery wallpaper.
This is unexpected,
I thought, but no one acted as if anything were different.

I finally asked, “This bed—why is it here?”

“We've thrown out the old furniture and bought new furniture,” Bomu said. “We got this bed just for you. You should sleep here from now on.” They all turned to me and smiled, and when I smiled confusedly in return, they all roared with laughter. I stood helplessly, cursing them. Xiao Lu finally took pity on me and told me that a TV series was renting out the courtyard house to use as a set and paying my relatives four thousand yuan—almost five hundred dollars—for a few days' inconvenience. Our house was going to be in one of those cheesy soap operas that they were always watching! Bobo and Bomu were giddy like children the night before a circus comes to town. “My” bedroom was to be the boudoir of a pop singer, a girl with sophisticated Western tastes. I imagined the camera framing the immaculate corner and cropping out the threadbare reality of my relatives' lives.

The crew descended on the house the next morning. I heard them arrive as I was taking my sponge bath in the room with a rag for a knob; moments later a crew member burst in on me. We both yelled in surprise and the door quickly shut. They unleashed chaos in the house. Actors got made up in the living room, directors called for silence during takes, and camera operators clambered over the roof like monkeys. Bomu's mother, a squat, bowlegged granny with no teeth, flirted mercilessly with the handsomest of the young actors. The crew set up a washing machine (clearly a fiction) in the middle of the rundown courtyard and took and retook a scene of an utterly ordinary middle-aged woman—a
very
famous actress, my relatives whispered to me—uttering a plaintive monologue that I didn't fully understand, her voice going high and wheedling over
something (the licentious pop singer girl? the world gone awry?). We were riveted. The house was full of laughter and I saw, for the first time, my relatives smiling and looking happy. The crew admired the old courtyard house; my relatives beamed and demurred.

“It's so run-down,” they said.

“But it's so rare for one family to have their own courtyard house these days,” said the crew, and my relatives had to agree. Most houses were now divided among many families. No one mentioned the fact that the house would be demolished soon.

Bobo pulled out
Quadrangles of Beijing
, a glossy bilingual book about courtyard houses, to show me. The houses in it were not like the rustic shanty we were sitting in now—the courtyards were all palatial in size, emptied of bicycles, laundry lines, and stacks of coal, and perfectly restored. They looked exactly how I had imagined courtyard houses to look before I actually came to China, like miniature Forbidden Cities. In fact, each courtyard house was designed using the same cosmological rules as the Forbidden City, and Confucian hierarchy was embedded right into its architecture; the tallest northern room always housed the eldest family members while the lower rooms housed younger generations. The book said the house was originally designed to be a symbol of stability in an eternally fluctuating world, and the empty space of the courtyard—with its piece of sky, its fruit tree, its caged bird—was meant to cultivate family harmony. The photos staged picturesque scenes: an old couple playing chess and drinking tea, or three generations of a family sitting together making dumplings.

But Bobo and his family never sat in the courtyard of their house. They never set out a table to eat or drink, never played chess or stargazed. The skies in the day were milk white with pollution and the night sky too obscured to see stars.

The TV series injected the courtyard house with one last burst of life right before its destruction and I learned the fun way what my family had been learning the hard way all these years (the second time is a farce, after
all): that life could be shuffled around as easily as sets in a play and we, its unwilling actors, would be forced to play along. If Bobo and Bomu suffered any sadness about the impending destruction, they did it inside, silently.

For those few days, fact and fiction were melded together, but after the house was demolished, the fiction peeled away like wallpaper. It was all that remained.

Back in IKEA, Bobo and Bomu had settled into their chairs. Had there been a TV on, we could have stayed all afternoon. It was a strange, cozy scene, so I took out my camera and told them to smile; they assumed stern, beatific expressions and I snapped a photo, setting off a bright flash. A salesman in a blue oxford rushed over.

“Please stop taking photos.”

“What's the big deal?”

“Store policy is no photos. Please put your camera away.”

Xiao Peng stood on the side, smirking. “People are taking pictures of the furniture and getting it copied cheaper elsewhere, you know.”

“I know,” I lied.

On the way out, I noticed that most shoppers left empty-handed. By the checkout counter was a row of waist-high cardboard bins filled with loose and inexpensive items: shrink-wrapped stacks of six colored plastic cups or five concentric containers for leftovers, bags of one hundred tea lights. Shoppers clustered around the bins and seemed to buy the items as souvenirs of their visit, or consolation prizes. We left without touching a thing.